’Tis the season of mothers finding out how far they would go when their drug-addicted daughters comes to them with a dead body on their hands. First we had Rosamund Pike in Hallow Road, talking to her hysterical daughter on speakerphone while she gets rid of a passer-by she ran over while high. Now we have Echo Valley,in which Julianne Moore helps her daughter to dispose of the body of her boyfriend, whom she says she clobbered in a fight over lost drugs. Both films are named after the places where the evil deeds go down, and in both films the mother knuckles down and helps out. Who wouldn’t try to keep their daughter out of prison?

The difference between the two films is in the writing. Where Hallow Road had one of the most ludicrous endings of the year, Echo Valley was written by the creator of Mare of Easttown, Brad Ingelsby. He swaps out the gritty blue-collar environs of Chester County, Pennsylvania, for a leafier, richer place in the country, but finds plenty of grit in Moore’s performance as a mother under extreme duress.

“I always thought I was too boring for my life to be this messed up,” says Moore’s Kate Garrett, who lives on a farm where she trains horses, but also has to beg her ex-husband, Richard (Kyle MacLachlan), for money when the roof starts to collapse. And then there’s their prodigal daughter, Claire (Sydney Sweeney), struggling to stay clean and mixed up with the wrong kinds of men.

Ingelsby has a gift for laying bare the cratered family dynamics around addiction, and the ties of money and blood that threaten to pull the entire family under. When Claire shows up one night in a panic, with the body and a story of how a fight between them got out of hand, the question that always bedevils stories like this — why doesn’t Kate just go to the police? — is answered by two things. First, the performance of Sweeney, whose mixture of anguish and vulnerability is just enough to open the coldest heart, and, second, a small gesture that Moore performs after checking that the body is indeed in the back of the car: she gingerly pokes a stray, sneakered foot that prevents the door from closing.

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From that moment on she’s in. Her only real mistake is to get rid of the body in a lake, which as anybody who has watched numerous corpse disposals in movies, from Psycho to The Deep End, can tell you, is not a good idea. As Claire points out, “Bodies float.” Meanwhile consciences sink, and the director, Michael Pearce, floods the film with enough aquatic imagery to let us know that Kate is morally underwater. When Claire’s drug dealer — a superbly malicious turn from Domhnall Gleeson — turns up to find out what happened to his money, the screw of the plot is tightened to an almost unbearable degree. Inglebsy has a corker of an ending up his sleeve that allows this small, low-budget film to punch above its weight.

Apple seems to have resolved its own addiction — to handing out blank cheques to auteurs in the autumn of their careers to make mega-budget films like Killers of the Flower Moon and Napoleon that really belong in cinemas. This is one of those small, low-budget films that used to be called “indies” and require anointment at Sundance to find their audience. But with its juicy narrative hook, strong writing and flinthead-sharp performances (look out for a winning appearance from Fiona Shaw), it is exactly the kind of film you want to curl up with at home. It makes you grateful for the roof over your head.
★★★★☆
Michael Pearce, 15, 104min

Tim Roth came to Hollywood’s attention in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, in 1992, playing a tough guy who took an entire movie to bleed out, painfully and believably. And this is the role he plays in John Maclean’s Tornado, which is a kind of samurai movie set in 18th-century Scotland — Kurosawa in a kilt, as it were. Roth plays Sugarman, the leader of a ruthless highway gang in ardent pursuit of a young Japanese woman known only as Tornado (Koki) across the Highlands. Cue lots of staring contests against a landscape of windswept gorse and granite outcrop, like a Sergio Leone western, only chillier.

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Maclean’s film is a little sluggish at first, lacking the humour and verve you want from this kind of mash-up. A long flashback reveals that Tornado once belonged to a travelling circus, where her father (Takehiro Hira) worked as a puppeteer. A former samurai who trained her in swordplay, he is slain by the gang in front of her eyes, so she embarks on a relentless path of vengeance, defeating the gang members one by one. That pivot, from pursued to pursuer, isn’t handled very effectively (is that why the flashback is so long? So we forget who was chasing whom?) but once the revenge plot is strung taut, the arrow finds its target.
★★★☆☆
John Maclean, 15, 91min

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